Collectif Met(z) :

Olivier Manchion

The Faust List, 6 Jan 2005

So I met Jean-Hervé by pure chance something like early '96. Then I took the car and Amaury and I went to meet them at Koeln in June '96, when they played at Stadtgarten with a lot of other musicians around like Thomas Koener, if I remember correctly. In the end they sent kilos of grass on us, the audience. And I don't remember exactly how, but surely looking for gigs for Ulan Bator (at the time we had just released our 2nd 'album', an EP, and things were going very fast and well) I imagine that Jean-Pierre Boschetti from Musiques Volantes was looking for events, and so I proposed it to him, and Jean-Hervé agreed and gave a name to the team, Collectif Met(z). Our (excellent) drummer at the time was not so much interested in all of that, thinking, I guess, that we were just fascinated by the 'legend', more than by playing music, but from our side we were completely ecstatic with Rien, and so by Faust before and NOW. Thereafter he also joined for some other (and that time officialy entitled Faust inc.UB) crazy gigs. I had asked Dominique Repecaud from 'Vandoeuvre/Musique Action' (Nancy's suburb) if it was possible to rehearse at his CCAM theater, and so we met there.

From our side we were so excited that we took everything we had in our chalkmines-studio: big and little synths, metal-container, basses and guitars, drums-kit, amplifiers, a lot of stuff... that we never used! After 3 or 4 hours of installation on the CCAM stage, Zappi stopped and said it was finished. From the other side, there was Francois Dietz, the sound engineer of the place who was preparing cables and microphones for hours in order to record what we could have play.... but you can see all the stuff on the photos.

The day after we played in Metz at Le Caveau des Trinitaires. It was quite crazy, a place for jazz, a vault. I think that the Faust's truck was bigger than the place! When Zappi finished installing his stuff, the stage was completely full. Inside that we tried to find a place for... our feet. I remember I also put a little drum-kit, like snare/cymbal somewhere, and then our amplifiers.

Looking from the audience, Jean-Hervé was on the right side (voice, trumpet, bass, painting) Zappi was.. everywhere! (percussion, drums, loops...) We were on the left side, I was playing bass, 'bow', and some objects (but did it work? I was convinced of it anyway!). I remember something like being physically part of Zappi's drum-kit. Amaury, playing guitar, was on the right side with half of the feet in the air, completely on the stage's border. And, during a wild version of Hurricane, he fell down, like jumping with first his head, still playing guitar, wow... On the master tape you can hear it, the guitar stops for like 20 seconds and thenafter starts again, really 'wicked'. He had 'just' one lip 'opened'... blood ... but we understood it later. Rock'n'Roll.

The map of the gig was like 'SchneeTum, calm, sea, rain, hurricane...' and so we improvised around some Faust songs. In the end of the gig Jean-Hervé set fire to something like 1 kilo or more of powder, really so much, and everything was white. It had properly became RIEN.

Thereafter we did other gigs, until being 8 people on stage. It's an other fantastic story.

ref: Collectif Met(z) & Plateformes

ref: The Faust Mailing List

ref: More Info, Images & Downloads